Today is the anniversary of D-Day / Operation Neptune, the “largest seaborne invasion in history”. Is there anything that Hitler or the German military command could have reasonably done on D-Day or afterwards, to alter the final outcome of the war? Or was it already a hopeless cause at that point?
The Allies had planned to capture Carentan, St. Lô, Caen, and Bayeux on D-Day, but didn’t capture any of these objectives. If the Germans had been more decisive, could they have turned the tide, overrun the beachheads, and thrown back the invasion? Or was the avalanche of Allied men and war machines heading their way just too great, no matter what decisions they made?
The Nazis were already doomed by 6/6/44. They were still going to be crushed, in any event, even with an Allied disaster in Normandy. The only question was how much territory the Soviets would finish occupying by V-E Day.
I mean this as no disrespect to those Allied servicemen who braved the beaches on that day.
The Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad
The Siege of Leningrad had been broken
The U.S. and British had invaded Italy
And the Luftwaffe was losing more than 1,000 planes per month - far more than the German’s ability to replace.
If D-Day 6/6/44 hadn’t been successful, it would have been on 7/6/44, 8/6/44 or some other date.
Sometimes I forget about the mind-boggling epic scale of WWII. The numbers of planes, tanks, warships, submarines, etc produced during WWII absolutely dwarfs everything we’ve produced since.
There’s an interesting counterfactual there. Suppose D-Day ends with a massive catastrophe for the allies (a freak storm comes in, or something), and the allies in the West just keep hitting freakishly unlucky snags, but the Red Army just keeps chugging along. What happens? What do Wermacht units occupying a still-fairly-subdued France do when Berlin falls?
And how does it change the post-war balance of power if the Soviets end up occupying all of Germany (both in terms of the pure logistics of who is where, and the “prestige” of seemingly having beaten Hitler single-handedly)?
Germany was fighting three wars by 1944; a land war against the Soviet Union, a land war against Britain and America, and an air war. And it was losing all three of them. The only question was which war was going to defeat them first.
Pure speculation here. I’d guess that Hitler and the SS would have tried to make a stand in Germany rather than evacuate to France, Italy, or Norway. Once the hardcore fanatics were killed by the Soviets in Germany, the more rational holdouts in the occupied territories would have sought quick terms so they could surrender to America and Britain rather than Russia.
Both sides would have been annoyed at the other but they still had some overlapping goals. We wanted the Soviets to join in on the war against Japan and they wanted a chance to grab some Japanese territory to go along with their captured German territory. So we would have planted fake smiles on our faces and accepted the status quo of a de facto border on the Rhine.
One thing that confuses me is that in many practical ways a second front was already open just when the Kursk offensive was taking place.
Hitler decided to call off Operation Citadel on July 13th 1943 because the Allies had opened the front in southern Italy. Just as the Russians need it, Hitler decided to send resources to Italy away from the Russian front.
The issue here is that I wonder why I get the impression that many do consider the Normandy invasion as being “the second front” When the the Italian campaign was already making the Germans go in disarray and making things a bit easier for the Russians in the eastern front.
Good question! Maybe part of it is that we think of invading occupied France as “liberating” an ally from the Nazis, while invading Italy was “merely” fighting a Nazi ally, so the first seems to have greater moral virtue, in a Hollywood-drama sense.
Of course, the real France-Italy dichotomy was never so stark: Vichy and all that in France; and Italy pragmatically joined the Allies once the writing was on the wall.
IIRC when the allied leaders met in Tehran Stalin pushed for Britain and the US to open up another front.
Till then they had been reluctant and wanted to come in from the south but by this point the Soviets were clearly ascendant. Germany was done for. It was just a matter of time.
Britain and the US realized that without their direct intervention the Soviets would hold sway over much of Europe. So, they knew they had to dive in and so they did. Obviously the Soviets still got a lot but not as much as they might have.
Remember, although the Soviets were allies no one on any side was under any illusion that they were all friends.
Strategically, the Italian front was a dead end. We slowly fought our way up a narrow mountainous peninsula which was perfect for defense. And where would we have ended up? The Alps?
It’s worth noting that when allied troops finally crossed the Italian border, they did it from the western side. The troops who landed in France in August 1944 where able to reach the border ahead of the troops who had landed in Italy in July 1943. From a military standpoint, we should have skipped the Italian campaign and gone directly to France.
In my opinion Germany effectively sealed their fate when they failed to capture the BEF at Dunkirk.
That meant that Britain did not have to come to a deal with Hitler and Nazi Germany was doomed from that point on to fight on at least two fronts. I’m not suggesting that doomed them to the same sort of defeat that we saw unfold, merely that they could never truly “win” once the multiple fronts were established.
In early September 1941 the Germans had more troops in the field than the Russians and a massive superiority in aircraft, tanks, and artillery. Hitler, in conference with his generals, expressed the opinion that the Russians would win. “We’ve lost the war”. He ordered the attack on Moscow in an attempt to politically destabiliise the Commmunist regime. On August 20th 1942 he went into a rage at his headquarters, shouting at his staff “Don’t you fools realise we’ve lost the war?” Even if D-day had failed Hitler would still not have believed Germany could win.
I concur with all. The war was on a path that would ensure Germany’s defeat, at some point. It’s also important to remember that the atomic bomb would be operational within 14 months. So one way or another, Germany was going to lose.
A more interesting discussion is when the point of no return was reached. I think that’s when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. But that was at the very core of Hitler’s strategy, so it’s impossible to take that off the table.
Is there any reasonable scenario in which the Germans successfully seize Leningrad and Stalingrad? Does such an outcome materially change the course of the war?
I’d take this further: Germany should have immediately surrendered/allied to the Allies once Stalingrad failed. Then, fighting together they might have prevented the Iron Curtain from getting westward beyond Poland.
Well, I suppose that if the US/UK invasions had been such epic failures that no follow-on invasion of Western Europe would even be contemplated, that the Germans could have shifted a large part of their forces from Western Europe and Italy (if those invasions somehow failed as well) to reinforce their lines in Eastern Europe. It wouldn’t have stopped the Soviets from taking back Eastern Europe but might have bought the Germans more time to build more defenses, train new soldiers and build more equipment.
In the end, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference in any case as between Allied air bombing strikes, Allied escort fighters and the Red Army advances the Germans were in an unwinnable position by this point, but it would have cost the Soviets a hell of a lot more in lost men and equipment for the final victory…that might have made a big difference in how things eventually spun out. I could see the war dragging on into 1946 or even 1947 depending on what the US and the UK did after their defeat on D-Day and what the Germans did in response to shift forces. Certainly, it would have changed the post-war dynamics.
Germany as a country, yes. Independent German units, no. Nobody wanted to be a prisoner of the Russians, so they all headed for British or American lines to surrender.